The Men Even Wrote a Book About It

15052016

University City

Dateline U-City because Dr. Gouldner spent the latter part of his academic career at WU.

This should seem rather familiar:

Dr. Gouldner assumed that as the student radicals aged and entered the work force, they would retain their leftist sympathies. But he conceded that they might also work to shore up their privileges. He characterized the new class as the great hope of the left in a period when the American labor movement was in decline, yet also as flawed.

The Pew study doesn’t necessarily vindicate Dr. Gouldner’s entire theory. But it does indicate that the most highly educated professionals are coming to form, if not a new class, at least a reliably liberal political grouping.

While there’s ample evidence of the professional class using its economic and educational capital to preserve its advantages — think of the clustering of professionals into exclusive neighborhoods, or the early immersion of professional-class children into a world of literacy, art and science…

Sounds like it was foreshadowing a certain book.

As for the question that serves as the title of the article, I think from the point I left off, it’s easy to figure out.

Let’s say that there was a credible governing ideology called supercalifragilisticexpialidociousism, and let’s say that of all the credible options, it served the interests of the top one percent of the top one percent the best. Of course, they would have an incentive to purchase and wield influence in and around academia, especially its elite institutions, to make sure that the country’s brightest minds either advocate supercalifragilisticexpialidociousism, or if they advocate another ideology, it’s one that presents no real threat to the Top 0.01%, or if not that, stay neutral. Then, we would be reading NYT headlines like: